After travelling from Tokyo via Paris and Barcelona yesterday, I was on Alicante beach at sunrise this morning together with the municipal tractor raking the sands in preparation for another day's sunbathers. Over an excellent breakfast at the Hesperia Lucentum in the center of town I read a couple of articles by Jose Maria Tortosa, director of the Institute of Social Development and Peace. The articles were about oil development in Ecuador and the Basque country, but he is a very wide-ranging sociologist. I met him at midday in his office -- which was completely without paper, as he had to leave it today in order for repairs to be carried out -- and we explained our respective institutes (CsPR in my case). As the institute in Alicante specializes in Europe and Latin America and we specialize in Asia and to some extent Africa there could be  good fit. After a one-beer lunch we recorded a short interview.

Today Satoshi Nakano and I visited EMC, an online storage company that has awarded some money to CsPR as part of its Heritage Trust Project. Their marketing people gave us the lowdown on the company, which has swallowed up dozens of storage-related software companies over the last few years. The literature they gave us doesn't mention open source anywhere, so probably no promising leads for me in that respect, although I do wonder what the situation is with standards for storage software. Anyway, they will hold a press conference in May to announce the sponsorship, and all the CsPR faces will be there.

Afterwards Satoshi and I discussed what to do with the funding. The tentative conclusion that we reached was to allot some for scanning of surveys of atomic bomb victims, and some for digitizing taped interviews with people involved in fighting in the Philippines in WW2 (Satoshi's field of research). The atomic bomb victims surveys encompass a huge amount of data, so this would be more of a pilot venture. The Philippines project is doable within a year and could serve as a working model of a published multimedia archive that could then attract more funding.

Today saw the start of a symposium on Japan's regions organized by Peter Matanle of Sheffield University. Although the main focus of the symposium is Japan, Peter cannily invited a few experts on European regions facing population decline. Their presentations showed a lot of similarities between issues faced in Japan and, for example, the Ruhr Valley and the Scottish Highlands and Islands.

After a gentle run round the leafy Sheffield streets in the beautiful morning sun, the 20 or so of us gathered once again in the Yorkshire Arts Space. A cool venue, but unfortunately the accoustics are not good enough for meetings -- an enormous echo -- and the lack of blinds made the slides difficult to see. Anyway, I gave my talk on open source software and local economic revitazilization in the early afternoon, which went perhaps better than expected. I then slept on the purple sofa outside the conference room.

One topic of conversation has been how to publish up to 20 papers. That's rather too many for a single book or special issue of a journal.

This morning we discussed how to publish the results of our symposium. The discussion went in a rather unexpected direction, culminating in an agreement to co-author four longer chapters, each with three or four authors, rather than to write individual chapters. That makes sense for a number of reasons: some of us need to publish most of the material elsewhere; there are too many contributors to allow everyone a full chapter; and the event brought us together intellectually as well as geographically, and co-authoring offers a way of continuing the useful exchange of ideas.

In the afternoon Peter Matanle drove Tony Rausch, Winfried Flüchter and myself out through the lovely Peak District scenery up to the Derwent Dam, where we videod some interviews of ourselves talking about research methodologies. This exercise brought it home to me how unsystematic my research method is. Nice scenery, though.

Back in Tokyo for two weeks before leaving for the UK again. The train from Sheffield to Manchester Airport was surprisingly punctual, and I enjoyed talking to Thomas Feldhof who was on his way back to Duisburg. Learned about the life of a Berlitz language school manager, for one thing. I started reading Sebastian Faulks' Engleby in the plane; Cambridge in the mid-1970s was close enough to Oxford in the mid-1980s for the book to bring back lots of memories.

The few days in Sheffield were a useful reminder of the pressure to publish under which UK academics find themselves. Higher productivity is achieved at the expense, in some cases at least, of a collegiate atmosphere and a sense of fun. Given that the enjoyable nature of the work is the compensation offered to academics in return for low salaries, the long-term effect may be to drive bright people away from academia. Still, there'll always be people you can pay to write stuff, and publishers happy to let you pay them to publish it. The trick is probably to imagine myself working in a UK university, in order to make myself write more, whil enjoying the relative freedom and friendliness of Hitotsubashi.

Yesterday, with encouragement from Victor Faessell at UCSB, I did some refactoring work on the Global Studies Consortium website. It now sucks less than before! Now I need to poke some GSC participants around the world to provide some content...